Saturday, November 4, 2017

Calculating the Impact of Weaponized Drones on Civilian Casualties

Several recent articles published in the JHU
News-Letter have called for the Applied Physics Laboratory to end its research
on weaponized drone technology and refuse future cooperation with the US government’s
drone programs.These calls stem from
the hundreds of civilians known to have been killed or injured by American
drone strikes during the ongoing War on Terror.Such deaths are tragic and demand reforms to how our military utilizes drone
strikes moving forward.I hope to
discuss my reform proposals in a future article.

Nevertheless, it is not at all clear that the introduction of weaponized drone
technology has increased civilian casualties overall, relative to what they
would be in a world without drones. This means the APL is being illogically and
unfairly blamed for technological contributions which may well have saved
lives.Furthermore, drones are certainly
here to stay on the 21st century battlefield with or without Hopkins’
continued involvement.Knowing this, discontinuing
that involvement would likely do more harm than good.

***

Estimates of how many civilians have been
killed by drone strikes vary wildly.In
June 2016, President Obama conceded internal investigations had revealed 64-116
civilian casualties from US drone strikes throughout the course of his
tenure.Most independent studies agree
this figure is far too low; more aggressive figures come from the London-based
Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ), a left-leaning watchdog agency which
keeps meticulous records of all airstrike reports from many competing
sources. As of October 29th of this year, they calculate a minimum of
639 civilian deaths and a maximum of 1380 (versus roughly 6,000-9,000
combatants killed) between all suspected or possible US drone strikes in
Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia since 2002.These estimates are higher than those of most
other investigations; but, for the sake of argument, let’s assume they are
correct.

The drone debate is often framed as a simple value
judgment whether that number is too high, or whether it’s an acceptable price
to pay in pursuit of America’s foreign policy goals.But this framework is far too simplistic,
because it fails to account for the litany of other ways drone strikes cause or
prevent civilian casualties indirectly. The
more important ethical question is the impact of drone strikes on the number of
civilians killed on the battlefield overall – by any means, drone or otherwise.
This is a much more complicated question, and the raw bean-counting of how many
civilians’ drones have killed directly
is but one variable involved.

Another variable is the number of civilians
which might have been killed by conventional military interventions – but weren’t,
due to the military’s preference for drone warfare.Drones are far safer for civilians than
conventional military operations, and far more precise than any alternative
airstrike method.A central question,
therefore, to the debate surrounding drones and civilian casualties is the extent
to which they are used instead of
versus in addition to
conventional military intervention.

The United States currently conducts drone
strikes in at least four nations (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia)
and has historically deployed them in at least four more (Iraq, Algeria, Iran, and
Libya).Were weaponized drone strikes no
longer a military option, the military would have to decide what to do instead
about the terrorist threats in those regions.In some of those regions, they may elect to do nothing, and allow the
known terrorist groups residing there to operate unperturbed.In others, they may attempt to kill the known
or suspected enemy combatants using more conventional airstrike methods
(including bombs dropped from airplanes, long distance artillery rounds, or
cruise missiles fired from warships).And in other regions, they may decide to put boots on the ground (either
deploying special operations forces, invading with conventional forces, or both).

It's impossible to know for sure which options
our political and military leaders would choose in which region were drones not
available.But if there’s any substitution effect going on at all, wherein we use
drones instead of using a more
conventional method for military intervention, the tradeoff in civilian
casualties is almost definitely worth it from a humanitarian perspective.Recall
that the BIJ’s highest estimate of civilian casualties from drone strikes alone
topped out at 1,380. By comparison, the civilian death toll from the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan was at least 210,000 violent deaths as of 2015, with an upper
estimate of nearly 500,000 when considering indirect causes (like battered
infrastructure, decreased health conditions, food shortages, etc). The vast majority of those victims were not
killed by American weapons directly – but they’re dead just the same, as direct
consequence of the US decision to invade.

Short of replacing a full-scale invasion, drones
also save lives when they replace conventional airstrikes.In Syria, for example, where the US-backed
coalition against ISIS has largely eschewed drones in favor of Air Force
bombing, the civilian death toll from American strikes during this year alone
is over 600 by CENTCOM’s own admission.Watchdog groups like Airwars.com allege totals as high as 4,000.

The point is, drones are the most accurate and least
invasive method of military intervention we have.If you are wary of the American military
industrial complex’s political sway, it’s difficult to imagine that the
alternative to a world with drones is a world in which the United States simply
minds its business and keeps the troops home.And if you remember the consequences back when the War on Terror was
fought primarily with conventional armies, that alternative world is a frightening
one indeed.

A third variable in play is the number of
civilians which might have been killed by local terrorists – but weren’t,
because drone strikes killed those terrorists first.American weapons are not the only thing
blowing up civilians in these countries.Arguably the largest threat to civilian life are the terrorists
themselves, who habitually and intentionally set off car bombs or suicide vests
in crowded public places, with the deliberate aim of killing as many civilians
as possible.From 1980-2015, a minimum
of 4,814 suicide attacksoccurred in over 40 countries, killing over 45,000 people. 75% of these attacks took place the three of
the countries most heavily targeted by drone strikes: Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan.

Drone strikes save
lives by hampering the planning and execution of those attacks, killing small
numbers of bad guys before they go on to kill larger numbers of good
people.The overall size of this impact is
difficult to quantify, but Johnston
and Sarbahidiscovered that from
2007-2011, drone strikes in Northwestern Pakistan created a commensurate
decrease in both the number and deadliness of terror attacks. There is evidence,
therefore, that the most heavily droned regions have seen a decrease in overall violence, in close temporal
relation to when the drones began falling the heaviest.

On the flip side, there is a fourth variable: although
drone strikes kill terrorists, it is also likely they are creating them to some
extent. Drones are extremely unpopular in the Middle East, and have been used
heavily in enemy recruitment propaganda.Furthermore, there is intuitive reason to suspect that the relatives of
those killed by drones will be more easily radicalized against the United
States (though again, this also occurs when civilians are killed by
conventional means).For all our decades
of anti-terror efforts, overall membership in radical Salafi-Jihadist
groups is as high as ever.Once
again, it’s impossible to know how many new terror recruits were inspired by
drone strikes as opposed to some other motive, but it’s important to consider
this impact as well.

With all that in mind, our formula for the
number of innocent lives drone strikes have saved looks something like this:

Lives Saved = a + (b*z) – c – (d*z)

Wherein the variables stand for the following:

a = Civilians who would have died from conventional military
engagements (which were avoided, to some extent, thanks to the military’s
preference for drone warfare)

b = The number of terrorists killed by drone strikes which
could not have been killed by conventional methods

z = The number of
innocent people the average terrorist kills

c = The number of
innocent people killed by drone strikes

d = the number of
terrorists radicalized by the bad PR of drone strikes

***

Given the range of uncertainty for each of
those values, that’s an extremely murky picture.To my eyes, it’s much too murky to say with
any empirical confidence that the value of Lives Saved is positive or
negative.What’s more, it is murky even with
the benefit of hindsight; back in the early 2000’s – when APL was supposedly
first developing drone technology – it would have been even less possible to
know whether the invention would help or hurt.

Neither can we know how whatever weapons APL is
researching today will be used in the future, nor towards what ends.If even political scientists cannot predict
such complex future outcomes, and even philosophers cannot agree on the ethics
of warfare, how is it fair to burden the physicist with this responsibility?

I don’t know whether drones have saved lives
or not, and neither do you.It’s largely
a moot point, though, because they’re
not going away regardless. The government has plenty of them already in
operation, and if it’s not the APL that researches them it will doubtlessly be
some other laboratory (certainly including Chinese and Russian laboratories,
who will use them with much less respect for international norms than we). To stand athwart the incessant tide of
technological progress in the field would be both futile and sanctimonious,
achieving nothing beyond the psychic comfort of a delusory moral high ground.

A better strategy is to focus our efforts on
refining military power through both political and technological means.
This means holding politicians and Soldiers accountable for abuses, reinforcing
checks and balances, and pursuing international cooperation to ensure the wrong
technology doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. And when we are asked to
lend technical expertise, it means using the cutting edge of science to adapt
the clumsy and indiscriminate military technology of yesteryear so that it
better comports with modern norms on collateral damage. An engaged APL
can improve aerial imagery to prevent civilian-combatant mix-ups. It can
make our explosions more contained; radar more precise; communications more
reliable; body armor more effective; vehicles more resistant to IED blasts;
MEDEVAC helicopters capable of flying further on each tank of fuel. It
can lean in and improve our military to make warfare less awful, instead of
watching it inflict avoidable pain for the sake of saying “at least we had no part in it.”

I join my former classmates’ opposition to our nation’s
unfortunate history of meddlesome warmongering – but to me, blaming the
researchers is barking up the wrong tree.